{"slug": "adobe-flash", "name": "Adobe Flash", "category": "browsers", "category_name": "Browsers and extensions", "description": "", "recommenders": 16, "commenters": 43, "warners": 13, "score": 6.211, "rising": -4.24, "first": "2025-11-04", "latest": "2026-10-23", "why": "I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 16, "neutral": 14, "compare": 1, "warn": 13}, "spark": [0, 0, 2, 3, 7, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "gitlab.com/cleanflash/installer", "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Adobe Flash", "Flash", "Adobe Flash Player", "Macromedia Flash", "Flash Player"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 796743665, "item_id": 49796479, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49796479", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-22", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.", "excerpt": "I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash. I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform. It was so fun that it was \"animation-first\"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want t", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "First Shader from Zero in Godot 4"}, {"id": 778577552, "item_id": 48661097, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661097", "by": "willchis", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day", "excerpt": "The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-00s/jamiroquai-2003", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stealing Is a Skill"}, {"id": 771318304, "item_id": 48207394, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207394", "by": "xtracto", "date": "2026-05-20", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "most people don't realize what we lost with Flash", "excerpt": "Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry. Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit. HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.", "context": "", "use_case": "Animation and multimedia (historical)", "switched_from": "", "story": "Map of Metal"}, {"id": 766553842, "item_id": 47909615, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909615", "by": "carlosjobim", "date": "2026-04-26", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities.", "excerpt": "If you want to see the future of photo platforms like Flickr, you should download the cooliris.swf file from here: https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software: https://ruffle.rs This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 759113408, "item_id": 47444588, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444588", "by": "jiveturkey", "date": "2026-03-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i absolutely adored adobe flash", "excerpt": "> Anytime someone refers to a sector as a \"space\" (as in \"I'm really getting into the AI space\") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.Anytime someone refers to a sector as a \"space\" (as in \"I'm really getting into the AI space\") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. oh come on. jargon is incredibly useful. here on HN we know that very well. clanker, agent, +1, LGTM, these are extremely convenient jargon we us", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 802192912, "item_id": 50137057, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137057", "by": "reaperducer", "date": "2026-10-18", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Flash on mobile was a battery killer.", "excerpt": "Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time. You're half right. Yes, Jobs killed Flash. But he did it because Flash on mobile was a battery killer. And when the original iPhone came out (one of which I still have), battery technology wasn't as advanced as it is now. Before I got my w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not"}, {"id": 777353105, "item_id": 48584569, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584569", "by": "dghlsakjg", "date": "2026-06-18", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "The concept was very cool, the execution was not.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m not being intentionally obtuse. I\u2019m just not viewing a dead technology with rose colored glasses. If you don\u2019t like unity on account of being too powerful pick from the dozen or more easily found projects that do what flash did in the same creator friendly way. Here\u2019s one: https://www.wickeditor.com/ Again, people didn\u2019t love flash. They loved the content that was created. Having to deal with updating flash and a", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe"}, {"id": 773339312, "item_id": 48333707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333707", "by": "harshitaneja", "date": "2026-05-30", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling", "excerpt": "I don't have the same rosy memory of the history as you do. I remember very regularly having to wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling and doing all kinds of voodoo I could to get sites to run, sites I used fine the day prior. Figuring it all out on my oh so slow connection and hoping no one calls the landline lest it stops all the progress. Not saying it wasn't a fun period of chaos and I everyday wish for ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade?"}, {"id": 772058352, "item_id": 48253647, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253647", "by": "jason_oster", "date": "2026-05-23", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave were bad for the web", "excerpt": "On the extreme end, a web app can do all of its own rendering in a canvas with WebGL/WebGPU. Some apps do exactly this: Figma, Google Maps, Google Docs. Just to name a few. (edit: Earlier I claimed PDFjs uses canvas, but it does not. I was confusing it with Google Docs [1].) It's a thing you can do. But it is very bad for extensions and extension developers for the same reasons that Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Don't Roll Your Own"}]}], "who": [{"by": "ciroduran", "context": "former Flash/ActionScript developer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862711", "date": "2026-02-02"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["fast tasks", "creating navigation buttons", "animation and multimedia (historical)", "code maps", "vector animation authoring", "animation authoring"], "compared": [{"slug": "ruffle", "name": "Ruffle", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-opus", "name": "Claude Opus", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "wine", "name": "Wine", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "safari", "name": "Safari", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "adobe-animate", "name": "Adobe Animate", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 755064240, "item_id": 47191515, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191515", "by": "Brajeshwar", "date": "2026-02-27", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Yes, Computers in the 90s were rare in India and even rarer in the North-Eastern region. I took every opportunity to be around computers during school and college days, mostly helping out pro bono. I might have visited and helped almost every commercial establishment with computers in my town. Fortunately, I also had a weird cousin, much older than me, who reads and talks about some of the weirdest things in the worl", "context": "", "use_case": "Interactive animation authoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47253177", "title": "Building a New Flash", "mentions": 7}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533848", "title": "Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859732", "title": "Adobe Animate (formerly Flash) will be discontinued on March 1st", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862574", "title": "Adobe Animate will be discontinued effective March 1, 2026", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46762150", "title": "The Browser Is the Sandbox", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46421709", "title": "Macromedia Flash, from an Animator's Standpoint", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"warn": 1, "compare": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 2, "warn": 2}, "2026-02": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 3, "recommend": 3}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 7, "warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 2}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 3, "warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 803382993, "item_id": 50211437, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50211437", "by": "WillAdams", "date": "2026-10-23", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "It was quite surprising some of the things folks did w/ Flash --- notably including a full-fledged 2.5D CAM tool: https://github.com/Jack000/PartKAM", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The HTML-in-Canvas API origin trial"}, {"id": 802192912, "item_id": 50137057, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137057", "by": "reaperducer", "date": "2026-10-18", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Flash on mobile was a battery killer.", "excerpt": "Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time. You're half right. Yes, Jobs killed Flash. But he did it because Flash on mobile was a battery killer. And when the original iPhone came out (one of which I still have), battery technology wasn't as advanced as it is now. Before I got my w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not"}, {"id": 796743665, "item_id": 49796479, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49796479", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-22", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.", "excerpt": "I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash. I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform. It was so fun that it was \"animation-first\"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want t", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "First Shader from Zero in Godot 4"}, {"id": 787266577, "item_id": 49204161, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204161", "by": "christina97", "date": "2026-08-06", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Right now I use either Opus (for smart stuff) or Flash without thinking (for fast stuff).", "excerpt": "There\u2019s some kind of tradeoff between speed, cost, and quality for every application. I would be perfectly happy with a model 6 months old that was 50x faster for many uses. Right now I use either Opus (for smart stuff) or Flash without thinking (for fast stuff). I would take an even dumber model for more speed (lower latency in particular).", "context": "", "use_case": "fast tasks", "switched_from": "", "story": "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"}, {"id": 784799168, "item_id": 49049948, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049948", "by": "Jaxan", "date": "2026-07-25", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we used to create buttons for navigation in flash", "excerpt": "Oh this reminds me that we used to create buttons for navigation in flash!", "context": "", "use_case": "Creating navigation buttons", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stolen Buttons"}, {"id": 778577552, "item_id": 48661097, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661097", "by": "willchis", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day", "excerpt": "The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-00s/jamiroquai-2003", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stealing Is a Skill"}, {"id": 777353105, "item_id": 48584569, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584569", "by": "dghlsakjg", "date": "2026-06-18", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "The concept was very cool, the execution was not.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m not being intentionally obtuse. I\u2019m just not viewing a dead technology with rose colored glasses. If you don\u2019t like unity on account of being too powerful pick from the dozen or more easily found projects that do what flash did in the same creator friendly way. Here\u2019s one: https://www.wickeditor.com/ Again, people didn\u2019t love flash. They loved the content that was created. Having to deal with updating flash and a", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe"}, {"id": 776618496, "item_id": 48538656, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48538656", "by": "nl", "date": "2026-06-15", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Apple didn't even have an AppStore in mind until people started hacking apps onto it. Remember back in 2007 when Apple first told developers that to develop for the iPhone, they\u2019d need to build WebApps for Safari? Well, that really was the plan. At the time, Jobs said: The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe"}, {"id": 776591841, "item_id": 48536990, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536990", "by": "thisislife2", "date": "2026-06-14", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "install the original Flash player plug-in in it", "excerpt": "Or you can just use PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org/ ) and install the original Flash player plug-in in it.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe"}, {"id": 773822930, "item_id": 48363933, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363933", "by": "mhotchen", "date": "2026-06-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "going all the way back to Flash which I worked with professionally", "excerpt": "Location: London, UK Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Permanent: No Technologies: TypeScript, Python, PHP, SQL, Terraform, Linux, AWS, AWS Lambda Email: m@mhn.me My name's Matthew Hotchen. I was founding engineer of a successful YC-backed substance use management platform (Pelago Health) delivering rapidly on dozens of features, creating a well-structured backend, data pipeline, and multi-region HITRUST certified ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 773339312, "item_id": 48333707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333707", "by": "harshitaneja", "date": "2026-05-30", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling", "excerpt": "I don't have the same rosy memory of the history as you do. I remember very regularly having to wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling and doing all kinds of voodoo I could to get sites to run, sites I used fine the day prior. Figuring it all out on my oh so slow connection and hoping no one calls the landline lest it stops all the progress. Not saying it wasn't a fun period of chaos and I everyday wish for ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade?"}, {"id": 772058352, "item_id": 48253647, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253647", "by": "jason_oster", "date": "2026-05-23", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave were bad for the web", "excerpt": "On the extreme end, a web app can do all of its own rendering in a canvas with WebGL/WebGPU. Some apps do exactly this: Figma, Google Maps, Google Docs. Just to name a few. (edit: Earlier I claimed PDFjs uses canvas, but it does not. I was confusing it with Google Docs [1].) It's a thing you can do. But it is very bad for extensions and extension developers for the same reasons that Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Don't Roll Your Own"}, {"id": 771318304, "item_id": 48207394, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207394", "by": "xtracto", "date": "2026-05-20", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "most people don't realize what we lost with Flash", "excerpt": "Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry. Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit. HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.", "context": "", "use_case": "Animation and multimedia (historical)", "switched_from": "", "story": "Map of Metal"}, {"id": 766553842, "item_id": 47909615, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909615", "by": "carlosjobim", "date": "2026-04-26", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities.", "excerpt": "If you want to see the future of photo platforms like Flickr, you should download the cooliris.swf file from here: https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software: https://ruffle.rs This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766358992, "item_id": 47897437, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897437", "by": "traderj0e", "date": "2026-04-24", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "The proprietary and insecure parts were real problems too.", "excerpt": "The most famous criticism of Flash was \"Thoughts on Flash\" by Steve Jobs, which said among other things that it's too inefficient. He did cite inconsistent hardware acceleration for H.264 that was a real performance drawback of Flash for video in particular, but was also complaining about the power usage for interactive Flash content in general. Jobs was right at the time from what I can tell, but somehow the end res", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why I'm Done Making Desktop Applications"}, {"id": 759113408, "item_id": 47444588, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444588", "by": "jiveturkey", "date": "2026-03-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i absolutely adored adobe flash", "excerpt": "> Anytime someone refers to a sector as a \"space\" (as in \"I'm really getting into the AI space\") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.Anytime someone refers to a sector as a \"space\" (as in \"I'm really getting into the AI space\") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. oh come on. jargon is incredibly useful. here on HN we know that very well. clanker, agent, +1, LGTM, these are extremely convenient jargon we us", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment"}, {"id": 758076992, "item_id": 47379812, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379812", "by": "tontinton", "date": "2026-03-14", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Yeah we all converge to the same workflow, in my ai coding agent I'm working on now, I've added an \"index\" tool that uses tree-sitter to compress and show the AI a skeleton of a code file. Here's the implementation for the interested: https://github.com/tontinton/maki/blob/main/maki-code-index%2Fsrc%2Flib.rs", "context": "", "use_case": "Code maps", "switched_from": "", "story": "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"}, {"id": 756279120, "item_id": 47267445, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47267445", "by": "AlienRobot", "date": "2026-03-05", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the important thing about Flash wasn't the vector rendering but the vector art authoring tools", "excerpt": "Every time I see SVG mentioned with Flash I just think it's immensely ignorant. No offense, but programmers love to think of \"vectors\" as SVG because it's all they know. For several years I kept hearing people say \"we have HTML5 and SVG now, so we don't need Flash anymore.\" And with that Flash animations and games were lost forever and I'm still bitter about it. For artists, SVG is probably the worst vector format im", "context": "", "use_case": "Vector animation authoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a New Flash"}, {"id": 756204736, "item_id": 47262796, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47262796", "by": "KaiserPro", "date": "2026-03-05", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "From what I recall part of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386224/ was animated in flash, if not all.", "context": "", "use_case": "Animation authoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a New Flash"}, {"id": 756126384, "item_id": 47257899, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257899", "by": "qingcharles", "date": "2026-03-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Flash was great.", "excerpt": "Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS? I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent f", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a New Flash"}, {"id": 756114544, "item_id": 47257159, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257159", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-03-04", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "it barely ran then and killed the battery", "excerpt": "This is a myth that needs to die. The first iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor and could barely run Safari. If you scrolled to fast you would get a checkerbox while Safari was trying to catch up. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478 If it couldn\u2019t run Safari with decent performance, how was it going to run Safari + Flash? In fact when Flash finally did come to Android in 2010, it required a 1Ghz p", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a New Flash"}, {"id": 756113872, "item_id": 47257117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257117", "by": "Brajeshwar", "date": "2026-03-04", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth.", "excerpt": "I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I\u2019m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics. Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn\u2019t notice anything that interested me. I don\u2019t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called \u201cASfunction\u201d inside Flash, \u201cWhat? You ca", "context": "programmer who did programmatic design", "use_case": "animation and ActionScript development", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a New Flash"}, {"id": 756102176, "item_id": 47256386, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256386", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-03-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer", "excerpt": "I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows. I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not \"lost media\" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I su", "context": "", "use_case": "Animation and game authoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a New Flash"}, {"id": 756066944, "item_id": 47254184, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254184", "by": "cableshaft", "date": "2026-03-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since", "excerpt": "I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a New Flash"}, {"id": 755696164, "item_id": 47231010, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231010", "by": "andai", "date": "2026-03-03", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Flash was probably unmatched in that regard", "excerpt": "People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;) Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a \"programmer\" who has no problem handling the engine side of things. That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very ill", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Excommunicated Devs Making Games with AI"}, {"id": 754855712, "item_id": 47178482, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178482", "by": "miroljub", "date": "2026-02-27", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "For all its flaws, it was our best hope.", "excerpt": "> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? We had Flash for exactly that purpose. For all its flaws, it was our best hope. A shame Apple and later Adobe decided to kill it in favor of HTML5. The second best bet was Java Applets, but the technology came too early and was dead before it could fly off. Some may mention WebAssembly, but I just ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Smartphone Mkt to Decline 13% in '26, Largest Drop Ever Due to Memory Shortage"}, {"id": 753070817, "item_id": 47066926, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066926", "by": "DonHopkins", "date": "2026-02-18", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Flash completely missed the most important point of HyperCard", "excerpt": "I thought the whole point of HyperCard is that the editor is the live app, that live apps can flip into editor mode at any time, and you THE USER can edit them live, mash them up with other apps, create your own unique apps, that there is no difference between app developer and app user, between the editor and the live app, because they are one and the same. Anything less totally misses the entire point of HyperCard.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Breadboard \u2013 a modern HyperCard for building web apps on the canvas"}, {"id": 751131842, "item_id": 46945740, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945740", "by": "skykooler", "date": "2026-02-09", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's inspired mainly by Macromedia Flash, Apple GarageBand, and Kdenlive.", "excerpt": "I'm working on Lightningbeam (https://lightningbeam.org), an integrated multimedia editor. It's inspired mainly by Macromedia Flash, Apple GarageBand, and Kdenlive. It combines animation, audio and video editing into a single timeline. It's cross-platform, running natively on Linux, macOS and Windows. I'm currently rewriting the UI in Rust - previously it had a Rust backend and a JS frontend using Tauri, but I ran in", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)"}, {"id": 750369664, "item_id": 46898104, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898104", "by": "nindalf", "date": "2026-02-05", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "If you weren't aware previously, you'll be pleased to learn that you can still program in Flash if you really want to, and distribute your programs on the web. https://ruffle.rs", "context": "", "use_case": "interactive web content authoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Adobe Animate will be discontinued effective March 1, 2026"}, {"id": 750262628, "item_id": 46891414, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891414", "by": "mschuster91", "date": "2026-02-04", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Flash with its constant stream of security vulnerabilities was ripe for exploits", "excerpt": "> In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries \"in English\" and get back answers. And yet, precisely that h", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI Is Killing B2B SaaS"}, {"id": 749874913, "item_id": 46867182, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867182", "by": "Lammy", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Macromedia Flash MX was also the first version released after Adobe started running scared and fighting dirty with a look-and-feel lawsuit against Macromedia Flash 5 for its use of tabbed UI palettes: https://web.archive.org/web/20010516014855/http://www.adobefacts.com/ \u201cAdobe's tabbed palette, used throughout Adobe's products, are being copied by Macromedia\u00ae in many of its products, including Macromedia\u00ae Flash\u2122 5, D", "context": "", "use_case": "Animation and interactive content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Adobe Animate (formerly Flash) will be discontinued on March 1st"}, {"id": 749812048, "item_id": 46863253, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46863253", "by": "ForHackernews", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Sounds like too many big institutional websites depend on Flash.", "excerpt": "https://www.gameslearningsociety.org/why-does-china-still-use-flash/ > Although the Flash Player app formally reached its end of life on December 31, 2020, Adobe has allowed a local Chinese company to continue distributing Flash inside China, where the application still remains a large part of the local IT ecosystem and is broadly used across both the public and private sectors. Sounds like too many big institutional", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Adobe Animate (formerly Flash) will be discontinued on March 1st"}, {"id": 749803376, "item_id": 46862711, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862711", "by": "ciroduran", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I made games with Flash and Actionscript until ~2015.", "excerpt": "I had a start programming and doing little weird animations back in the early 2000s. Then I could earn a living doing stuff with Actionscript, little games on the web, or profile picture generators; even stuff on the BlackBerry PlayBook, which had support for AIR runtime. I made games with Flash and Actionscript until ~2015. Newgrounds even holds a jam called Flash Forward, in which you submit Flash games https://www", "context": "former Flash/ActionScript developer", "use_case": "Games and animations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Adobe Animate will be discontinued effective March 1, 2026"}, {"id": 749801536, "item_id": 46862596, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862596", "by": "Lammy", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "They still maintain it for China actually", "excerpt": "> although Flash Player died a long time ago They still maintain it for China actually: https://gitlab.com/cleanflash/installer", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Adobe Animate (formerly Flash) will be discontinued on March 1st"}, {"id": 749620976, "item_id": 46851311, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851311", "by": "jodrellblank", "date": "2026-02-01", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "the experience was poor", "excerpt": "You say the security and battery issues \"were solvable\", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; F", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple: Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free (1976)"}, {"id": 748474816, "item_id": 46779676, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779676", "by": "mejutoco", "date": "2026-01-27", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "it was very easy to write things that leaked memory in Flash", "excerpt": "It is possible I was holding it wrong. I do not doubt your experience, but it was very easy to write things that leaked memory in Flash, and it was impossible to remove those leaks sometimes. I was part of a project where a lot of effort went into removing references etc and it was still not working. We had to have 2 instances restarting each other. It was a mess. Maybe we can agree those were \"bad components\". I bla", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Browser Is the Sandbox"}, {"id": 748458420, "item_id": 46778651, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46778651", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-01-27", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "put Flash inside their renderer sandbox", "excerpt": "My memory of this time is getting a bit fuzzy tbh, but from what I remember Google in the first part of the 2010s put Flash inside their renderer sandbox and Safari/Firefox were still lagging on browser sandboxing at that time. I think Adobe had shared the plugin code with Google to make this possible. There are certainly obvious issues with securing a third party codebase you don't control, and it's likely that the ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Browser Is the Sandbox"}, {"id": 744912288, "item_id": 46557018, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46557018", "by": "azakai", "date": "2026-01-09", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "But the web ecosystem moved away from those things for a reason.", "excerpt": "> What does \"portable\" mean? In the context of the web, portability means that you can, ideally at least, use any browser on any platform to access any website. Of course that isn't always possible, as you say. But adding a big new restriction, \"these websites only run on x86\" was very unpopular in the web ecosystem - we should at least aim to increase portability, not reduce it. > And was NPAPI not a part of the web", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What Happened to WebAssembly"}, {"id": 744495217, "item_id": 46530951, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46530951", "by": "ctoth", "date": "2026-01-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Flash was great", "excerpt": "So I have been using the human-authored web since well... 1999 or so, starting with old AOL CDs. I've obviously seen a lot of human content. Back in the old days you might have image links and other fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was great, especially the people who made their whole site out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.) Then we", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"}, {"id": 743882817, "item_id": 46492676, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492676", "by": "spicyjpeg", "date": "2026-01-04", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Flash provided a ready-to-go authoring solution for UI and 2D animation", "excerpt": "Custom Flash players were actually relatively common in game development during the mid to late 2000s, as Flash provided a ready-to-go authoring solution for UI and 2D animation that artists were already familiar with. Autodesk's Scaleform was probably the most popular implementation but a number of AAA developers had their own in-house libraries similar to Doom 3's; some of them, such as Konami's \"AFP\" [1], are stil", "context": "", "use_case": "game UI and 2D animation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Macromedia Flash, from an Animator's Standpoint"}]}